At Minneapolis charter school, hybrid model brings students to classroom for online learning

As Sarah Swanson flipped the pages of the book she was reading to her kindergarten class, she repeated a gentle reminder: "Please keep your mask on."

Though many of the kindergartners at Harvest Best Academy attended half-day classes outdoors for the last few weeks, Tuesday marked the full test of the school's "learning pod" model, aimed at providing space and assistance for students to complete their distance learning.

About 200 of the 750 students at the K-8 charter school are participating in the pods, which split the classes among three buildings in north Minneapolis. Additional locations may be added as more families opt in.

Each pod has about 65 students and the pods remain separated to help limit the potential spread of COVID-19. Because students in grades 1-8 are learning online, students across multiple grade levels can be in the same space.

"This is all new for everyone," Executive Director Eric Mahmoud said. "We expect a bump in interest as parents continue to get used to it."

The kindergartners still receive in-person instruction, but the rest of the students are participating in virtual learning. After getting their temperatures checked at the front door, they file in and sit at desks spaced apart, each one surrounded by a plastic sneeze guard. With their headphones and face masks on, they log online and join video calls with their teacher and the rest of their classmates. If they need assistance with an assignment, they can raise their hand and a paraprofessional will help guide them through it.

"It's really working," Mahmoud said on Tuesday morning as he peeked into a classroom where all the students were focused, leaning toward their laptops.

The only noise was the dull whir of the new air filtration system at the front of the room. Even the hallways were quiet and nearly empty. Much of the typical classroom decorations and furniture have been pushed into corners to accommodate the extra space between desks.

Tuesday lacked the same bustling energy that the first weeks of school normally brings, Mahmoud said. But simply bringing students into the building again brought a bit of that back-to-school feeling, he said.

When the school started distance learning last spring, Mahmoud made sure that each student had a laptop to take home. But only half of the students were logging on.

"It wasn't because the students were lazy or the parents didn't care, it was because the students didn't have a conducive environment for learning," Mahmoud said. "We had to think about a scalable solution."

The coming year will continue to require new solutions, Mahmoud said. All summer he thought about how the COVID-19 pandemic could widen the achievement gap.

"That's the motivation for us," he said. "Distance learning does not work unless there's adult supervision, so we have to provide that support."

Kindergarten teacher Sarah Graham is grateful that her students have an in-person option.

"It's really different," she said as she pumped hand sanitizer in her palms. "But they staying are so flexible. We'll just keep seeing how it goes."